Richard Easther
I chalked up a personal first yesterday; I saw an aurora with my own eyes and it was every bit as remarkable as I could have hoped for. I was not alone in sharing this special moment – anyone outside before midnight without clouds overhead in New Zealand (and, in fact, much of the world outside of the tropics) could have done the same, as these displays are driven by a once-in-decades solar storm.
Continue reading “Keep Looking Up”
Amongst everything else that happened in 2023, a key anniversary of a huge leap in our understanding of the Universe passed largely unnoticed – the centenary of the realisation that not only was our Sun one of many stars in the Milky Way galaxy but that our galaxy was one of many galaxies in the Universe.
Continue reading “A Bigger Sky”
There is insight in the stories that numbers can tell, and for some of us that insight offers a sense of calm in turbulent times. Which may be why in the midst of this year’s rains I started making graphs of the accumulated rainfall and how it stacked up against previous years.
I’ve been using social media since I found Usenet as a PhD student in the early 1990s. I was teaching at Yale when Facebook arrived from Harvard (one day it wasn’t there, then suddenly it was), I remember the debates about whether blogging was a risk to one’s academic career, and I joined Instagram to follow my kid’s musical activities.
New Zealand is suddenly and unexpectedly a “spacefaring nation”, with locally built rockets regularly launched to orbit and even the Moon. This is a shock to many – it certainly surprised me, and I live and breathe this stuff. But now that we find ourselves with an unexpected lead in a couple of key events in the Space Olympics, how do we make the most of it?
Last week, Science Twitter was roiled by claims that “disruptive science” was on the wane and that this might be reversed by “reading widely”, taking “year long sabbaticals” and “focussing less on quantity … and more on …quality”. It blew up, which is probably not surprising given that it first pandered to our collective angst and then suggested some highly congenial remedies.
It’s always nice to wake up to good news, and it is not necessarily a common experience as we reach the end of the second year of a pandemic. But for astronomers, two decades of anxiety were laid to rest over the weekend as the last mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, were locked into place.
If there is an afterlife for physicists it will certainly include conferences pulling together luminaries from across the centuries: “Newton, you really must meet Einstein, he’s over there by the registration desk. I know you’ll have lots to talk about.”
The media is full of stories about the impending release of the first ever images of a black hole – images that not only represent cutting edge science, but are the culmination of 200 years of speculation and theory moving ever closer to observation.
This is huge for astrophysics, and a stunning example of how the mundane rules of our tangible, everyday world give physicists the ability to make intellectual leaps into the unknown – and the long-thought unknowable.
Continue reading “Dark Stars”
